Like a bird with a crippled wing, Northeast Airlines Flight 823 swayed in the stormy sky above LaGuardia Airport on a freezing February night nearly 60 years ago.

Snow and ice pelted the aircraft as it begrudgingly climbed. Still, its 95 passengers remained calm, just glad to finally be off the ground after waiting more three hours to depart because of the severe weather. Some of them were already sleeping.

But there was nothing that could be done. The Miami-bound plane crashed into a patch of trees on Rikers Island, ripping off its wings and bursting into flames less than a minute after take-off.

Panicked fliers began scrambling through gaping holes in the fuselage as flames engulfed the cabin. One man dragged his shrieking wife out by her hair. Burning babies were thrown from the plane and rolled in the snow. The jet hissed and screamed as a final explosion rocked its ravaged metal frame and took 20 lives with it. The survivors howled for help, while those who could, ran. It had been less than 2 minutes since the plane crashed.

Then out of the darkness came the most unlikely of saviors: inmates from Rikers.

Their remarkable turn that night was so heroic that it eventually earned 57 of them reduced or commuted sentences from a grateful city.

Antonio Cuin was one of the prisoners-turned-heroes, but while it will be the 60th anniversary of the 1957 crash on Feb. 1, his son only just learned of his role.

The pilot and flight engineer examine the wreckageGetty Images

“My dad’s never been in jail,” Antonio Cuin, Jr., first told The Post by phone several weeks ago. “I hate to tell you, but you’ve got the wrong guy.”

The son was only convinced that his dad had indeed been on Rikers — and helped rescue the plane’s passengers — after The Post told him that genealogy records showed there was only one Antonio Cuin in the United States at that time. The prisoner’s Social Security number also matched up with that of Antonio Jr.’s dad, who was already halfway into his six months-to-a-year jail sentence on a minor drug-possession rap at the time of the crash.

Ironically, while Antonio Jr. didn’t know all of his dad’s Rikers past, he was well-aware of the plane crash.

Antonio Jr. grew up to become a warden on Rikers Island, where the story was legendary.

“The older COs that worked there at the time and were there that night used to talk about it,” Antonio Jr. said.

It’s not something that the surviving fliers would ever forget, either.

Passenger Kenneth Kronen told The Post that without Cuin and the other inmates, he and his family likely would have perished.

“They were the people who rescued us. . . . I don’t know if all of us would’ve even gotten out without them,” Kronen, now 89, said from his home on the Upper East Side.

Kronen was a 29-year-old textile salesman at the time of the crash, headed to Miami with his wife and two sons to visit family. They weren’t suppose to be on Flight 823. The family had missed their morning flight when their cabbie took a wrong turn on the way to the airport. They then managed to get tickets on the later plane.

In hindsight, “That plane should’ve never taken off,” Kronen said.

“It took off and rose to maybe 2,000 feet when it went zooming down head-first [toward] the prison.

“We were all burning. . . . It was so hot, and the plane was on fire,’’ Kronen recalled. “I threw my son, Mark, outside because there were flames on him, and he landed on a snow bank.”

Mark was 6 weeks old at the time. His brother Richard, 2, was with their mother.

“I only knew what to do in that moment, and that was getting him out of the plane,” Kronen said. “That was the last time I saw him until two days later.”

An image of the wreckageGetty Images

Mark remained covered with snow while his family was whisked from the scene, still in shock, believing he had frozen to death. They tried to console themselves with the idea that at least Richard had survived.

But Mark was alive. An inmate discovered him when he stepped on him in the snow, and he brought him back to the prison.

“He saved my life, no question about it,” Mark told The Post. “I probably would’ve died if he hadn’t of found me.”

Deputy Warden James Harrison was on duty the night Flight 823 crashed onto the island. He described being jolted by an explosion and seeing the “brightest light he’d ever seen,” according to journalist Alvin Moscow’s account of the crash in his 1961 book on the tragedy, “Tiger On A Leash.”

Working in the shadow of LaGuardia’s flight paths, Harrison said, he had always feared this moment would come.

Suddenly, he was faced with one of the most difficult decisions of his career.

There were only 28 officers on duty, but there were 69 inmates available for snow removal. Should he send them into the storm to try to rescue passengers and risk their escape, or worse, death?

“Get the gangs who are ready for snow-clearing!” Harrison shouted to the desk officer.

“There are no officers to send with them!” the underling yelled back.

“Just send them out!” Harrison called before sprinting outside to the burning wreckage to help.

A policeman assists an unidentified survivorGetty Images

The first inmate to arrive at the scene worked as a housekeeper for the jail’s Protestant minister. He helped pull desperate passengers through the fuselage and doused their smoldering clothes with wet snow.

“To the horrified houseman, they looked as if they were wearing wax masks which were melting in the heat,” Moscow wrote of the passengers’ grotesque injuries.

Inside the plane, a hellish inferno had erupted. Passengers were plunged into darkness after the crash landing, and ferocious flames and a thick black smoke filled the cabin.

The emergency exits had been jammed, and the back of the plane was completely on fire. Passengers climbed through windows or hacked out escapes with an ax. Stewardesses cried out instructions to the passengers, beckoning them toward the available exits, but some fliers stayed in their seats, paralyzed with fear, unable to move.

“Like horses afraid to leave a burning barn, they preferred the familiarity of their seats to the unknown,” Moscow wrote.

Rescuing women and children first was not an option. The passengers trampled over one another to escape.

One woman would “bear the imprint of a man’s shoe on her back” for months after the crash, Moscow wrote.

Amid the mayhem, the dead were being dragged into a line in the snow, some burnt so badly that even gender couldn’t be determined.

The inmates began pairing up individually with survivors and stayed with them until they got help.

In a reception room-turned-triage center, an inmate offered a cigarette to a passenger with minor injuries. The flier said he only smoked cigars, so the inmate ran off and brought a cigar back from his cell mate.

All of the surviving passengers were taken to the jail, where inmates in the infirmary gave up their beds as others handed out water and helped apply Vaseline, bandages and other first aid.

In a reception room-turned-triage center, an inmate offered a cigarette to a passenger with minor injuries. The flier said he only smoked cigars, so the inmate ran off and brought a cigar back from his cell mate.

Nearby, Kenneth Kronen’s wife was having Vaseline applied to her face by an inmate.

“How do I look?” the scared wife asked the inmate.

“You look fine, just fine,” he gently replied.

The line between inmate and official rescuer became blurred. Young men labeled as criminals doted carefully on the fragile passengers with unexpected compassion.

“A negro inmate, who must have been more than six feet tall and three hundred pounds in weight, walked slowly around the room, rocking a boy of about three in the cradle of his arms,” Moscow wrote.

“He hummed softly and, oblivious to everything else in the room, never shifted the burden in his arms lest he disturb the child who was sleeping blissfully.”

But rumors started to circulate through the penitentiary that inmates released for rescue were escaping, and Deputy Harrison became fearful for his career.

City Department of Correction Commissioner Anne Kross assured him that his decision had been correct and said she would support him despite whatever happened.

By 1 a.m., all survivors had been taken to city hospitals, and every inmate was back in his cell. Not one had tried to escape.

While nearly 60 inmates eventually had their sentences reduced or commuted because of their heroic efforts, the public only knows 11 of their names. That’s because there is scant official record of their deeds.

Crash survivor Mark Kronen, pictured with his family in 2017. Mark was six weeks old at the time.Courtesy of Mark Kronen

Mark Kronen said he doesn’t know the name of the inmate who saved his life that night. But if he did, he would tell him and his family that he was a hero.

Kronen, who nearly lost three fingers on his right hand in the crash, said he grew up to be a tennis player who once went up against John McEnroe. He eventually settled into life as a Boar’s Head distributor on Long Island, married and had two daughters.

Today, he is a grandfather of three. He survived Hodgkin’s lymphoma twice and recently underwent open-heart surgery.

I can’t express how grateful I am,’’ Mark said of the inmate who plucked him from the snow that fateful day.